“His bottle…”

Asaf nodded. “Fell out of his pocket or his scrip or whatever genies have, when that other genie hit him with the thunderbolt. I guessed it might come in handy, so I picked it up. It was the dragon who drew my attention to it.”

“Pleased to be of service,” mumbled the King.

“It was the way the dragon jumped up in the air and made a little screaming noise when he saw it that put me on the right lines,” Asaf continued. “And while you two were having your slanging match, it suddenly occurred to me. Why would a genie, of all things, carry a bottle around with him? Particularly the sort of bottle he could never ever escape from. Shatterproof, you see. And non-biodegradable.”

Jane waited for a moment, and then said, “Well?”

“Simple.” Asaf sat down and opened a roll of peppermints. “Because he wanted to be put in it. Subconsciously, I guess. I mean, that ties in with all the rest of it. The wanting to destroy the world, and that stuff. What he really wanted to destroy was himself.”

Jane’s mental eyebrow rose sharply. This all sounded a bit too glib, too Lesson Three, Psychology For Beginners for her liking. Any minute now and he’d start talking about sublimated urges, cries for help and traumatic potty-training in early childhood. However, she held her peace.

“Added to which,” Asaf went on, “there’s the simple logic of the thing. All those chances he had to destroy the world, and he couldn’t actually do it. Bearing in mind what he was, that could only mean he didn’t want to do it. You do see that, don’t you?”

Jane frowned. “I don’t quite…”

“Well,” Asaf replied through a mouth full of peppermint debris, “it really does stand to reason. If you’re a genie and you want to destroy the world, you don’t muck about, you just get on with it.”

“Unless,” Jane interrupted, “somebody stops you.”

Asaf shook his head. “A genie who wanted to destroy the world wouldn’t have gone about it in a way that would have given anybody any opportunity to stop him. Isn’t that right? he asked the King, who nodded.

“Fair dinkum,” he said. “Five-minute job. Melt an ice-cap, release a plague virus, anything like that. All this pissing about with flowers and ants…” He shook his head in sage contempt.

“All self-delusion on his part,” Asaf went on. “Really, it was basically just a cry for help—”

Ah, thought Jane. Thank you.

“—because, deep down, he couldn’t stand being him. Thinking about it, you can see his point.”

“And when it came right down to it,” the King joined in, “when the chips were down and push came to shove and he actually could have destroyed the world if he wanted to, he just—”

“Lost his bottle?”

“You could,” Asaf said, frowning, “put it that way. If you had less taste than the average works canteen Yorkshire pudding, that is.”

Jane drew in a deep breath and looked at the sky. It was still, she noticed with relief and approval, there. As were all the other necessary odds and ends: the ground, for example, and the hills and the sea. Whatever the hell had been going on, it had stopped. Which was probably just as well.

“That’s that, then, is it?” she said.

“That’s that.”

“Good.” She turned round and beckoned to the carpet. “Let’s go home.”

The shop door opened.

“Justin,” called the proprietor, “I’m back. Anything happen while I was away?”

“Not really, Uncle.”

“Anybody buy anything?”

“No, Uncle.”

The proprietor glanced round. “Just a second,” he said. “Where’s the big Isfahan that was in the corner there? You know, the one with the goats.”

Justin swallowed. “A customer,” he said, “sort of borrowed it.”

“Borrowed it?”

“On approval,” Justin said.

“I see. Leave a deposit?”

Justin reached under the counter and produced the big, fat, heavy sack he’d discovered in his hand when he’d woken up and found himself back in the shop. As it touched down on the desk, it chinked; and there is only one substance in the whole of the periodic table that chinks. Two clues: it’s yellow, and before the development of specialist dental plastics they used to make false teeth out of it.

“I guess so,” he said.

Think what the sea can do to a coastline in thirty million years. The shock wave from the blast had the same effect on Kiss’s body in about a fifth of a second.

Souvenir hunters would have been disappointed. Not even the characteristic black silhouette etched on the glazed earth; just nothing at all to show that Kiss had ever existed.

He was disappointed. Optimist that he was, right up till the very last moment he’d somehow believed that when the smoke cleared he’d still be there; a bit singed, perhaps, and threadbare, like a character in a Loony-Tunes cartoon, but nevertheless basically in one piece. The stern reality that faced him when he came round, however, was that he was now m more pieces than the mind could possibly conceive.

Gosh, he said to himself (or rather, selves), so these are smithereens.

On the other hand, he reflected, it’s not use moping. It’s times like these when you just have to pull yourself together and…

Pull yourself together. Easier said then done.

He considered himself, hung in suspension above the surface of the planet like one aspirin dissolved in twenty million gallons of water. Spreading yourself a bit thin these days, Kiss, old son, he reflected. On the other hand…

Yes, he noticed; that’s interesting. He realised that every single atom of his former body still had the consciousness of the whole, so that instead of there being just one Kiss, there were now several billion. A shrewd operator, he reflected, could turn this situation to his own advantage.

A gust of high-level wind reminded him of the downside. True, there were billions of him, but each one on its own was about as ineffective as the average civil rights charter. It’s molecules united who can never be defeated. A solitary atom on its own, with nothing except the moral support of its fellows, is effectively dead in the water.

And likely to stay that way. Think of all the aggravation it takes to get together a mere twenty or so people for a school reunion, and then multiply that by ten billion.

Another aspect of the matter that he had to admit he didn’t like much was the fact that each individual consciousness seemed to be fading rapidly. How long since the blast — one second, maybe two — and already he was starting to sound in his mind’s ear like a cassette recorder with flat batteries.

There was, he recalled, a technical term for all this. What was it again? Ah, yes. Death.

Now there’s a thought. If I die, I’ll get to collect on my insurance policy.

(For he had indeed, many years ago and when under the influence of curdled whey, taken out a life policy with the most senior underwriter of them all. He had regretted it ever since, because (a) in the normal course of things he was immortal, and (b) he had nobody to leave the proceeds to even if he collected.)

Proviso B was still as valid as ever, but that was pretty well beside the point. So anxious was he to find a silver lining for the mushroom cloud that he was prepared to overlook the pointlessness of the exercise. Accordingly, he summoned up what energy he still had, and put a call through.

This wasn’t, in fact, difficult; since bits of him had been dispersed to every nook and cranny of the planet, it wasn’t surprising that one stray atom had lodged in the Chief Underwriter’s ear. This made notifying the claim fairly simple.

“Hi,” he said, “my name is Kiss, policy number 6590865098765. I’m dead, and I want to make—”

YOU CAN’T

The particle buzzed softly, confused. “How do you mean, I can’t?” he demanded. “If you want the policy document, it’s in a tin box under a flat stone in a crater in the Sea of Tranquillity. I can draw you a map if you like.”